Danes strike for 6-week vacations

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, May 12, 1998

DENMARK, a country usually noted for common sense and orderliness, was brought almost to its knees recently by strikers demanding a sixth week of annual paid vacation.

The nationwide walkout, which halted air traffic, shut down many hospitals and stopped deliveries of gasoline and some food, was ended only by the rushed passage last week of legislation forcing a settlement on employers and the unions.

But the strike told a lot about the spirit afflicting Denmark and Europe's other comfortable societies, which have had it too good for too long. As a Danish commentator put it: "The work ethic has been eroded to the point that workers believe it is worth disrupting the whole economy for the sake of yet more leisure."

The government compromise gives the work force two more days off while those with children under 15 get the right to three additional "care" days off a year. It wasn't explained how or why three extra days of leisure annually would improve family life, but it was a way of giving workers more time off for "social" reasons without appearing simply to yield to their demands.

The whole package will boost Danish industry's costs about 4 percent a year - which some economists claim will eat into its already questionable competitiveness in world markets for products like electronic equipment and machine tools. Experts warn that countries like Denmark have reached a point where the quality of what they produce may not make up for excessive prices.

But Denmark's unemployment rate is only 7 percent. This wouldn't be considered low in the United States. But it is in Europe, where high social welfare costs, low productivity and poor labor mobility have left most countries with double-digit joblessness figures.

In fact, the Danish workers' decision to go on strike for more free time was in line with other recent moves in Europe such as the French government's introduction of a 35-hour week, a step that experts at the intergovernmental Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development criticized as damaging to the flagging French economy.

The truth is that although politicians, labor union officials and business executives constantly proclaim the necessity of meeting the growing competitive challenge from the United States and Asia, few of them seem genuinely prepared to risk popular indignation by causing the pain that such an action would require. In most European countries, workers have been left in blissful ignorance of the danger they face of losing their jobs by not accepting scaled-down expectations while there's still time.

This is the biggest reason that U.S. industry, which recognized a decade ago how much the world had changed and reacted accordingly by cutting costs, continues to outpace the Europeans - and probably will do so for years to come.